Michael James Kavic

Biography

Michael Kavic joined the faculty of Long Island University at the Brooklyn campus as an assistant professor in the Fall of 2011. Prior to coming to LIU he served as a visiting assistant professor at the College of New Jersey in Ewing, NJ. He received his Ph.D. in Physics from Virginia Tech in 2009, his MS in Physics from the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill in 2004 and two BS degrees in Physics and Astrophysics from the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities in 2002. He pioneered a line of research investigating astrophysical tests of extra dimensional models and has worked extensively on foundational issues in quantum gravity with a focus on the problem of time. He is currently investigating astronomical sources of radio transients with a particular emphasis on sources related to quantum gravitational models. Observational searches are conducted for such radio transient signals with two recently constructed radio telescope arrays, the Long Wavelength Array (LWA) located in Socorro, NM and the Eight-meter-wavelength Transient Array (ETA) located in western Virginia. More recently Dr. Kavic has been investigating using LWA/ETA ionospheric data to investigate the effect of cosmic ray events on cloud formation. His work has been published in a variety of prestigious journals including Astrophysical Journal Letters and the Journal of Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics (JCAP). His work has been featured in national periodicals such as Science Daily, Nature News and New Scientist. Dr. Kavic’s pedagogical interests span a wide variety of topics in physics/astrophysics education. He has extensive experience in teaching general physics and introductory astrophysics. He makes use of methods for maintaining an interactive classroom environment including the use of "clickers", peer teaching and the workshop physics approach. He is the PI on a NASA-funded program, IMPRESS-Ed, which provides a summer research experience for future science teachers.

Research Interest

Quantum Gravity, Astrophysics